This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?
Play kitchens are no longer the brightly-colored, rounded-edge plastic toys of yesterday; they are now, thanks to companies like Ikea and undeniably chic miniatures of decidedly adult kitchens, complete with faux-subway tile and little fake gas burners.
What do love letters look like today? Has everyone’s access to the spurious democratic forms of self-presentation and confession on social media rendered the truly personal and private redundant – weird even? A young friend of mine tells me that no one she knows really writes love letters like what I’m talking about but that “even if it’s a text or a DM or whatever, it’s still a love letter, I guess, and you know it when you see it”.
These shifting aesthetics can tell us a lot about our culture's changing relationship with domestic performance — and the increasing pressure to have a "trophy kitchen," even if only a plastic one.
This unusual and relentlessly self-reflexive approach allows Van Booy to tell not only the story of the doomed Little, but also to tell the bigger story of how stories are told — their inherently incomplete yet collaborative nature. As Little explains, “Through the act of reading this novel, it’s actually you telling the story” because “when you see words, what’s imagined comes from your experience of life, not mine.”
“I wrote this book because I wanted to dream up a more hopeful world,” says Newitz in their acknowledgments. They have indeed gifted us a vibrant, quirky vision of endless potential earned by heroism, love and wit.
Street food sellers, hawkers, costermongers – familiar in the capital well into the 20th Century, affectionately caricatured in the popular prints and ballads known as the Cries of London, yet just as often marginalised as a desperate and sometimes dangerous underclass.
By contrast, Charlie Taverner’s engaging Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London puts street sellers at the centre of his narrative, convincingly arguing for their position at the “core of the city’s food system” over some three centuries.